This is my first post! Wow. Awesome. I promise you, this is an incredibly original idea and I actually have something to say on this post.

If you have been bored waiting around on my “coming soon” home page, then this is likey a welcome change of pace. We’ve actually got a home page! And a blog! and… nothing else? Yes, this is a deliberate choice. There’s nothing else on this site, for the time being at least. But there is an apt reason for this. In this article, I’d like to tackle the challenge of building a portfolio. Particularly, one of your own.

Portfolio pitfalls

When you’re building a website for a client or another business, your feelings as a developer building the project are somewhat lesser. Not to a major extent, but it’s natural when you compare the product with your own. A portfolio website is like your baby - you treat it with extensive care, you want to make sure it’s just right, everything has to be perfect!

Perfectionism is the first curse of portfolio projects, and one I’ve constantly battled with. It’s embarassing to say that I’ve struggled to publish a proper portfolio for YEARS, and this is one of the biggest reasons. This is the cycle I fell into:

  • I would get some free time, and I would get psyched up and determined to build a portfolio website.
  • So, I start designing. I’ve come up with a good set of pages, some fresh ideas, and a good feeling about things. Although I’m not exactly a designer, I’m happy with what I’ve done.
  • And then I’ve got to start development. It’s a lot easier to open up an Adobe XD file and start dragging boxes than it is to start a git repository for your favourite frontend at the time, set up your CMS of choice and start paying a subscription.
  • And then life happens. That task of building a website becomes irrelevant. Family, friends, the general happenings of life occur. Not to mention the balance of work.
  • By this point, it’s been months. You haven’t started development yet, but you’ve freed some time again. Now you’re ready to get back to work!
  • …aaaand now the love of your design has completely worn off. The design doesn’t match the image you want to portray. It’s back to the drawing board!

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been through this process, and I’m hoping other developers can relate. Even as I was developing this site, I had to grit my teeth because I had once again grown out of love with the design, and wanted to do yet another redo! But I had to stick to my guns to get this out.

Secondly, and probably less pronounced of a trap with portfolios is scope. Particularly on this iteration, I had so many things I wanted to do from the get go. I wanted a case studies page, I wanted to build this incredible awwward winning front page, and landing pages for different skills that I’m qualified in and so on and so forth. Truth is, that’s a big scope. Especially when working full time and having other commitments, that scope makes the process of building a portfolio daunting. Hence the X month long “coming soon” page. Life has been incredibly busy for me this past year, and the last thing I need is a daunting web project to fill out my free time. So I stripped all of the features out, knocked away all of the fun in place for getting the bare-bones out. I prioritised things this way:

  • Home. Of course you need a landing page. Every website has one. Of course, I didn’t want to ignore showcasing my knowledge of libraries such as GSAP, so I designed something enticing for a Home Screen. But not so complicated that I’d spend sleepless nights worrying about it. It's at least enough to get across who I am and what I do.
  • Insights: Or blog, posts, whatever you want to call it. It makes up for the barrenness of the site. Not enough content? Well this provides the bridge for that. It was important to me to establish a means of easily building up website content that is valuable. Valuable both for any readers and for myself as well.

To expand that last point in particular, I believe as a whole that developers underestimate the power of blog articles. Especially in the rapidly progressive age of AI, your writings as a developer are becoming more valuable than the code you produce. You could argue that content can be AI generated for blog articles and you would be right. That’s why search engines can detect this and affect your page rankings when it spots this. But code it can’t spot as much.

Possibly a hot take

Now I’ll try not to make too much of a point about AI, as I’ve got some great content planned for that in the future. But I believe with the developments of AI, it can actually more beneficial to create content about development than it is to show works. Why? Because you can show people you actually know what you’re doing. AI muddies the balance of understanding vs demonstration. And thus, showcasing an understanding becomes far more valuable than a demonstration of that understanding. Of course it’s best if you can do both, but a demonstration of something may not be sufficient enough to convince others of your prowess. Especially as models such as GPT 5 and Claude progress further to stake their claim on the developer market.

Conclusion

With all of that out of the way, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article and have maybe even learned something from it. I’m hoping to produce a lot more articles in the future. It’ll include opinion pieces (like this one), developer tutorials, discussions on web concepts, breakdowns of various websites & techniques and just any other things I feel is worth shedding light on. I’ll try and keep this platform as developer-centric as possible, although it’s possible I will write the occasional off-topic post.

Either way, thank you for taking the time to read my post! And I’ll be back with another one soon!